Pittsburgh area veterinarian changing education through "Frankie's Friends" | KD Sunday Spotlight
NEW KENSINGTON, Pa. (KDKA) - A veterinarian from New Kensington came up with an idea to help combat the feral cat population.
With that idea, she didn't expect people to come from all over the world to learn from her.
At Frankie's Friends, Dr. Becky Morrow told us about her two-day course which is changing the game in the veterinarian field.
Dr. Morrow always knew she wanted to be a veterinarian.
"You wrote down what you wanted to be when you grew up and in kindergarten, I wrote vet," she recalled.
The Tarentum native also fell in love with teaching and helping her community so that is why she started Frankie's Friends.
It's a non-profit that provides veterinarian care at a low cost.
"This started in my backyard with a mobile surgery unit and now we have a couple of buildings and we are adding to our mission of teaching others so they don't have to start over and recreate the wheel," Dr. Morrow said.
She designed a two-day workshop for veterinarians and vet techs to take a free, accredited spay and neutering course.
"There are a lot of students that get minimal experience in veterinary school with spay and neutering," she explained. "We're taught in a very different way how to spay and neuter than what is the most efficient, actually, what is the best for the animal, to be honest."
As a vet, she was the feral cat population problem with her own eyes and now, Frankie's Friends spays and neuters about 50 cats each day, but she knows that more needs to be done.
"About 80 percent of the kittens in shelters come from community cats," she said. "Our goal is to try to inspire and support the veterinarians in our community to add about five cats to their schedule. If they can do that, we can accomplish this together, we need to do this as a profession."
Dr. Morrow and her crew have their next course happening in January and they're already making an impact throughout the country.